“I knew you are
a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and
ready to relent from punishment.” Jonah’s words fly out of his mouth as an
accusation, a charge against God.
Jonah wanted
justice. He wanted things to be put right, and he wanted God to be the one to
make it happen. Nineveh was the capital of the neo-Assyrian empire – the people
who had exiled the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE. They burdened the Southern
Kingdom with heavy taxation. They deserved what was coming to them.
But Jonah still
didn’t want to go. He went the opposite direction instead. The faithfulness of
the sailors, praying to their gods, heightens Jonah’s unwillingness to do what
God asked him to do. In the belly of the fish – he was as good as dead – he had
some time to reflect on his situation. Jonah says, “As my life was ebbing away,
I
remembered the LORD;
and
my prayer came to you,
into
your holy temple.
Those
who worship vain idols
forsake
their true loyalty.
But
I with the voice of thanksgiving
will
sacrifice to you;
what
I have vowed I will pay.
Deliverance
belongs to the LORD!”
So he is spewed
on dry land and goes to Nineveh. His one-day walk would have hardly gotten him
to the center of town, and I’m guessing he spoke his five-word sermon under his
breath. And the people of Nineveh repent, contrary to all expectation.
And God changed
God’s mind, and Jonah loses it. “I knew about you, God.” “I knew about you and
your forgiving ways.” “I knew it.” “I could have just stayed home. The
storm, the belly of the fish, all of that suffering that you put me through,
and this is it?!?”
“Is it right for
you to be angry?” God asks, and I imagine Jonah storming out of the city. Fine,
God. At least you’re going to stick to your word, right? Justice still happens,
right?
Sometimes, it’s
really easy to confuse vengeance and justice. It’s even easier to call our
ideas of vengeance justice and to place God in the service of our desires and
ideas of how to set the world right. Our desires to make the world right by
hitting the bully back harder, by finding just the right word that will cut
through the smug look on our opponents’ face, are exposed when we come face to
face with what is, evidently, God’s idea of justice. Most of us don’t want to
admit how satisfying an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth feels. Most of
us don’t want to admit that we are happy to receive God’s grace, mercy, and
love and how terrible we are at sharing it… especially with our enemies.
The shade and comfort
of the bush having been removed from him, Jonah once again becomes angry. “Is
it right for you to be angry about the bush?” God asks. “Angry enough to die.”
I don’t want to live in a world where such injustices exist. I don’t want to
live in a world in which the justice of God means injustice for me. I don’t
want to live in a world where God doesn’t do what I want God to do and act the
way that I would have God act. And so we confuse the roles between Creator and
created, thinking that God’s capacity to show mercy and to forgive is similar
to ours.
“I knew that you
are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast
love, and ready to relent from punishing.”
Everyone in
Jonah is faithful – except Jonah. He sleeps while the sailors pray. He never
repents of having disobeyed God while the Ninevites proclaim a fast and repent.
He wants God to be on his side, and he thinks that God being on his side means
that God will do to Nineveh what Jonah would do to Nineveh.
What Jonah
misses is that, all along, God is on his side. Sometimes God-for-us comes into
the world as God-against-us, insofar as God refuses to allow our understandings
of grace, mercy, and love to be God’s understandings of grace, mercy and love.
God exposes our tendencies to represent vengeance as justice. Sometimes the
only way that God can be for us is to be against us, by exposing our tendencies
to take matters into our own hands, to act in the name of God without first
considering what God has to say about the matter.
The grace,
mercy, and love that Jonah is so unwilling to share is the very grace, mercy,
and love that Jonah takes for granted, all the while not realizing that God has
already saved his life three in the story: once from the belly of the whale and
twice from his own self-righteousness.
God’s grace,
mercy, and love never come to those who deserve it, and they rarely come on the
heels of our good behavior. They come at our lowest point, when we’re in the
bottom of the belly of the whale, when we’re blinded by self-righteous anger
and indignation.
“I know that you
are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,
and ready to forgive.” It is a charge. It is an accusation. It is God-for-us
even as God says “no” to our schemes to make ourselves into gods and cast God
into our image.
The grace of God
offends our imaginations. The mercy of God extends beyond our capacity to
forgive. God’s steadfast love holds us fast in our anger, in our bitterness,
and in our hatred. It is big enough to cover a prodigal prophet, who insists
that grace, love, and mercy be deserved, and saves him in spite of himself – in
spite of his own undeserving. Fortunately, God’s idea of justice is far
different from ours; it is the justice that declares the sinner has been made
righteous, that proclaims the prodigal is beloved, that repeats – again and
again – that it is never too late to find your way home.
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